Thanks for the links (though gamasutra didn't resolve for me)... I'll try to keep checking them over time. Looking them over, though, I don't think any of them meets the criteria of the resource the earlier poster was talking about.
This sounds like a 50% ripoff of an episode of TNG in which [... ] But picard can't tell them about it because of the prime directive.
There is no Prime Directive at the time of Enterprise. The ep they are discussing struck me as another step in laying the groundwork for Starfleet making such a rule. Once that was in place, future commanders, like Picard, could just point to the Prime Directive and say, "Sorry, love to help, but my hands are tied."
Yay for recycled plotlines.
Like TNG was groundbreaking...;-)
Long before TNG did Prime Directive stories, TOS had done them. And long before that the same concepts were explored in written SF...and so on...and so on. It's fun when you can see something really, truly new, but if that was the only criteria that made something good then there wouldn't be much reason to watch any Star Trek. The thing is, if it's well-done it's fun to watch. So what if Ghost in the Shell covers the same ground as Blade Runner? They are both more fun to watch than any ST:TNG movie...;-)
The courts would have to be crazier than I've given them credit for. That would mean binding the parents to the unsupervised judgement of someone the courts believe cannot exercise legally-binding judgement. The only justification for this would apparently be to punish them for not having properly performed the hitherto unknown parental reposnibility of not allowing a child to install software. Sounds weird. Not that I wouldn't put it past a lawyer to try it, of course...:-P
Time passes. The government THE PEOPLE put in place to protect these freedoms is slowly but surely taking them away.
Just to flesh out the "and then a miracle occurs" steps in the process, I'd replace them with...
Over time, in using the government to address more and more pet issues, the people turn a blind eye to the fact that the government has moved beyond the limits that were placed on it in the system of government.
The people are shocked (SHOCKED) to discover that the government isn't very interested in protecting our freedoms now that it has been firmly established that it is not really bound by the old system of government anymore.
Unfortunately, that change makes the process seem less mysterious. The people being shocked is still kind of funny, I guess.
Cheaters and trolls are making it harder for casual users and newbies to get hooked on the on-line versions of games.
If they got rid of cheaters, they'd just be losing an excuse. Hell, I've been accused of cheating when I'm having an "on" night, and I suck. In the end, a player that is playing far over the head of the others on the server can suck the fun out of the game as effectively as one that's cheating. If they are really concerned with playability they'll probably need to come up with some sort of skill rating, as well, so that games will be competitive. That and a killfile ability so you can avoid some of the crap that gets posted to chat by some, without missing the say's from other folks. Actually, a filter that translated variations of "ur momma" to "my momma" would at least make it more entertaining...
I recall a definite wrong answer once when I was playing it. I don't recall the exact question... the answer should have been "License to Kill" (one of the Timothy Dalton James Bond movies). They had the answer as "License Revoked". That may not have been on purpose since that was the 'working title' of the movie at one point... maybe they just stuck it in there during production and then forgot to change it when the movie title was finalized.
While I doubt that the music industry has gotten to the point of admitting it yet, what they need to do is lobby congress to protect reasonable profits by establishing a flat license fee.
Well, there's no reason that they have to stay in business (with or without "reasonable profits")... certainly no reason for the gov't to tax us to ensure it. But hey, the gov't doesn't have to make sense, I suppose.
I really can't see what else they can do. From the technological standpoint, bits copy well.
They can either come up with a viable business model for this century, or they can make way for people who aren't so wedded to the old distribution scheme. Either way, there will continue to be music for people who want to listen to it.
Finally I can take down my tent under that tower and move in with girl I really love.
When you brought the personal impact of this new technology into focus for us, my first reaction was one of happiness for you. But then I started wondering how you would break it to the one in the tent? I hope you have planned something less blunt than, "Sorry, you're not the girl I really love." We need to be cognizant of the human costs of new technologies. You should at least leave the tent up, I think.
You can't expect him to tell you that... it would be/.-ed, for crissakes!
There's at least one other admin that has started using the spot I use, but at this rate we have a long way to go before space will be a problem. I guess it would be kind of awkward if we both showed up at the same time, but that's life. He/she is very neat about it and has pretty much adopted the layout I was using, so I can't really complain.
It seems to me that it's more likely to be a side effect of the US War On Terror that is driving them to keep better log info.
I doubt the EU is just waiting for the US to tell them what to do all the time. It's probably just the normal disconnect between the people whose job it is to investigate things and other elements of the gov't. The law enforcement elements will obviously focus on the benefits of collecting and keeping data that will make it easier for them to investigate things (especially in internal documents, like this one). It is to be hoped that their wish list, once offered, will be turned back due to privacy concerns. I guess what I am saying is that the bigger story will be the larger EU reaction to this, not the proposal itself.
Re:Didn't here the E or T words..
on
Cradle to Cradle
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· Score: 1
Solar energy is too diffuse because we've got this thing called an atmosphere that filters out most of it. Orbital solar stations that turn the energy into microwaves and beam it down to earth are theoretically practical in a way that ground based solar will never be because microwaves will lose much less energy travelling through the atmosphere than unconvertad solar radiation.
Agreed, but there's something that makes me nervous about having orbital platforms that send concentrated beams of energy down to the planet. Maybe someone will come up with some clever scheme for preventing accidentally or deliberately "misaligned" units from firing. I assume the earth stations would be in pretty desolate areas, though, for a start.
Well, we used to play a lot of Advent[ure] and Star Trek back when I was in HS, but...;-)
Anyway, I don't see this as any different than having a rpg game session at the school, etc. It sounds like you have a good selection of games already, but you might consider Age of Wonders and Space Empires IV as two more, turn-based strategy thingies. Dungeon Siege is okay for multiplayer (although, like any Diablo-esque game, ultimately kind of pointless). If you have the right group together, you could even do Baldur's Gate II (pretty involved). Oh, and Worms World Party is fun, too.
I've contributed fixes and enhancements to a number of projects, but I am not listed as a developer on any of them (nor do I image I deserve to be). So, the many eyeballs are there even though only the primary pairs are listed on sourceforge.
Still, I imagine that the FUD masters will try to say this means there aren't many eyeballs.:-(
The benevolent dictatorship only works if that person has been placed on a pedastal by the people, and the people fully support him/her.
Well, if they don't (and the code license permits) they can take the code and make a new country where they are the benevolent dictator. If enough of the population moves from the one dictatorship to the other then the new one will flourish. The neat thing is how infrequently such code splits have been required thus far. The Linux kernel itself has mom-and-dad-are-fighting disagreements between LT and AC, but no divorce yet (though there have been separations...).
In most ways, regexen will be less complex than ever, yet more powerful. Read Larry's rationale for changing them and let us know how he's wrong -- his reasons made a lot of sense to me.
The problem is that there is a shitload of utility and cgi perl that will be broken if the perl on the server is upgraded. In some cases, like at ISPs, the code belongs to lots and lots of people that are totally unconnected from the administration of the site, so updating it becomes a nightmare. It's probably going to mean running two versions of perl (fortunately, perl doesn't take up a lot of space in/usr:-P ) and having to invoke it with version numbers... the normal messy drill.
I'm sure that the changes will be great, but it's hard to get too excited since, I must confess, the current system didn't seem so horrible to me.
5 years after it's released, every regex library in existence will be compatible with the Perl 6 way of doing things, so you might as well start learning them now.
Obviously I will learn the new syntax. And I will update my scripts to work with perl6. Etc. Etc. The thing is, it looks like perl is going to be taking back a lot of the time it saved me in the past. Once I've paid that cost I may be able to forget about it, but at this point I'm looking at having to add something really tedious to my to do list. And it's not like I have a lot of thumb-twiddling time I can steal from...
And here I thought Solaris was backward for not having embraced perl earlier than Solaris 8. Maybe it will turn out that they were [unintentionally, I'm sure] smarter than I thought...
Re:I just started learning Perl a two months ago..
on
Apocalypse 5 Released
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· Score: 1
yeee...
Many Perl 5 programs will require only trivial syntactic changes in order to run under Perl 6.
Most Perl 5 programs will be able to be ported to Perl 6 automatically, via the standard translator program.
And that was supposed to be one of the comforting parts of the article.:-P
I guess I need to start making a list of all the perl scripts we have here in case we decide to upgrade... fortunately, that was something I always wanted to do. Oh wait... did I say "always"? I meant "never".
Oh well, in a few years we'll look back on this and laugh. And that makes it all O K. As long as we stop laughing... the ones who don't will be locked up and mdedicated. Then they will be O K, too.
Actually, sendmail is used to... errrr... SEND mail.
Well, you don't have to have it listening on port 25 to send mail from your server. It only needs to listen to the port to receive mail. Of course, that assumes you aren't using something locally that won't queue it up with/usr/lib/sendmail for some reason. In that case you -could- just start it on localhost:25 (IIRC, not all versions of sendmail let you bind to particular IPs, tho)... I'd rather replace the thing that won't use/usr/lib/sendmail, but I'm kind of a lovable curmudgeonly bastard that way...;-)
I use exim at home rather than sendmail, but I administer about 100 Unix boxen at work that use sendmail for, among other things, remote security logging, availability monitoring [...]
I hear ya. YMMV, but try stopping the daemon on one the machines and send a test notice. Unless there is something really odd about your setup, the outgoing mail will still work. We run ours that way w/o a problem. Of course, you might say , "Hey, all my machines are behind a firewall, so relaying isn't an issue". But one less [fairly big] process is one less process.;-) It's always good to turn off ports you don't absolutely need.
OSes shipping with an open relay version of sendmail running as default were real pissers a few years back. Fortunately, that's largely been cleaned up.
...would have to be the reason why they're running web site on IRIX [netcraft.com].
Well, ya see, Iris isn't open source so it's okay. They know that terrorists and pedophiles and aliens (oh my!) aren't poring over the source code for Irix looking for vulnerabilities!;-)
The thing is, the "we get to develop for one platform" bit also goes for people writing worms, virii, etc. Like driver writers, they want to go for the biggest bang for their buck. When a cross-platform one is written (like one Symantec announced) it's big news because it's so uncommon.
Anyway, I would assume that they are mainly worrried about security on systems that are unlikely to have a cheapo soundcard plugged into them on a whim. Although, given the nutball level of what we have heard about the report so far, I guess I should wait until the actual report before assuming anything...;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the links (though gamasutra didn't resolve for me)... I'll try to keep checking them over time. Looking them over, though, I don't think any of them meets the criteria of the resource the earlier poster was talking about.
...that my wife will now make me throw out all of my original copies? :-O
This sounds like a 50% ripoff of an episode of TNG in which [ ... ] But picard can't tell them about it because of the prime directive.
There is no Prime Directive at the time of Enterprise. The ep they are discussing struck me as another step in laying the groundwork for Starfleet making such a rule. Once that was in place, future commanders, like Picard, could just point to the Prime Directive and say, "Sorry, love to help, but my hands are tied."
Yay for recycled plotlines.
Like TNG was groundbreaking... ;-)
Long before TNG did Prime Directive stories, TOS had done them. And long before that the same concepts were explored in written SF ...and so on ...and so on. It's fun when you can see something really, truly new, but if that was the only criteria that made something good then there wouldn't be much reason to watch any Star Trek. The thing is, if it's well-done it's fun to watch. So what if Ghost in the Shell covers the same ground as Blade Runner? They are both more fun to watch than any ST:TNG movie... ;-)
The courts would have to be crazier than I've given them credit for. That would mean binding the parents to the unsupervised judgement of someone the courts believe cannot exercise legally-binding judgement. The only justification for this would apparently be to punish them for not having properly performed the hitherto unknown parental reposnibility of not allowing a child to install software. Sounds weird. Not that I wouldn't put it past a lawyer to try it, of course... :-P
Just to flesh out the "and then a miracle occurs" steps in the process, I'd replace them with...
Unfortunately, that change makes the process seem less mysterious. The people being shocked is still kind of funny, I guess.
Cheaters and trolls are making it harder for casual users and newbies to get hooked on the on-line versions of games.
If they got rid of cheaters, they'd just be losing an excuse. Hell, I've been accused of cheating when I'm having an "on" night, and I suck. In the end, a player that is playing far over the head of the others on the server can suck the fun out of the game as effectively as one that's cheating. If they are really concerned with playability they'll probably need to come up with some sort of skill rating, as well, so that games will be competitive. That and a killfile ability so you can avoid some of the crap that gets posted to chat by some, without missing the say's from other folks. Actually, a filter that translated variations of "ur momma" to "my momma" would at least make it more entertaining...
I recall a definite wrong answer once when I was playing it. I don't recall the exact question... the answer should have been "License to Kill" (one of the Timothy Dalton James Bond movies). They had the answer as "License Revoked". That may not have been on purpose since that was the 'working title' of the movie at one point... maybe they just stuck it in there during production and then forgot to change it when the movie title was finalized.
So, now every time I go to the fridge to get a snack during commercials, I'm a thief?
That depends on whose fridge you are raiding, I suppose...
;-)
You asked what replaced books in most peoples lives. Here's you answer: Television.
Yep... and computers, too... Games and net activities.
While I doubt that the music industry has gotten to the point of admitting it yet, what they need to do is lobby congress to protect reasonable profits by establishing a flat license fee.
Well, there's no reason that they have to stay in business (with or without "reasonable profits")... certainly no reason for the gov't to tax us to ensure it. But hey, the gov't doesn't have to make sense, I suppose.
I really can't see what else they can do. From the technological standpoint, bits copy well.
They can either come up with a viable business model for this century, or they can make way for people who aren't so wedded to the old distribution scheme. Either way, there will continue to be music for people who want to listen to it.
Finally I can take down my tent under that tower and move in with girl I really love.
When you brought the personal impact of this new technology into focus for us, my first reaction was one of happiness for you. But then I started wondering how you would break it to the one in the tent? I hope you have planned something less blunt than, "Sorry, you're not the girl I really love." We need to be cognizant of the human costs of new technologies. You should at least leave the tent up, I think.
So, where do you dispose of your ex-users? ;-)
You can't expect him to tell you that... it would be /.-ed, for crissakes!
There's at least one other admin that has started using the spot I use, but at this rate we have a long way to go before space will be a problem. I guess it would be kind of awkward if we both showed up at the same time, but that's life. He/she is very neat about it and has pretty much adopted the layout I was using, so I can't really complain.
Although the Wayback Machine is really neat.
Hey... it is great fun. Here was one from 1998 announcing a new 25G drive which invited speculation on why you'd ever want a drive that big... ;-)
Sorry, Kiniski, but when I hear "wild child" I think Truffaut (as in his film "l'Enfant sauvage").
Maybe they should have called it the "upstart" web browser. :-P
It seems to me that it's more likely to be a side effect of the US War On Terror that is driving them to keep better log info.
I doubt the EU is just waiting for the US to tell them what to do all the time. It's probably just the normal disconnect between the people whose job it is to investigate things and other elements of the gov't. The law enforcement elements will obviously focus on the benefits of collecting and keeping data that will make it easier for them to investigate things (especially in internal documents, like this one). It is to be hoped that their wish list, once offered, will be turned back due to privacy concerns. I guess what I am saying is that the bigger story will be the larger EU reaction to this, not the proposal itself.
Solar energy is too diffuse because we've got this thing called an atmosphere that filters out most of it. Orbital solar stations that turn the energy into microwaves and beam it down to earth are theoretically practical in a way that ground based solar will never be because microwaves will lose much less energy travelling through the atmosphere than unconvertad solar radiation.
Agreed, but there's something that makes me nervous about having orbital platforms that send concentrated beams of energy down to the planet. Maybe someone will come up with some clever scheme for preventing accidentally or deliberately "misaligned" units from firing. I assume the earth stations would be in pretty desolate areas, though, for a start.
Well, we used to play a lot of Advent[ure] and Star Trek back when I was in HS, but... ;-)
Anyway, I don't see this as any different than having a rpg game session at the school, etc. It sounds like you have a good selection of games already, but you might consider Age of Wonders and Space Empires IV as two more, turn-based strategy thingies. Dungeon Siege is okay for multiplayer (although, like any Diablo-esque game, ultimately kind of pointless). If you have the right group together, you could even do Baldur's Gate II (pretty involved). Oh, and Worms World Party is fun, too.
I've contributed fixes and enhancements to a number of projects, but I am not listed as a developer on any of them (nor do I image I deserve to be). So, the many eyeballs are there even though only the primary pairs are listed on sourceforge.
Still, I imagine that the FUD masters will try to say this means there aren't many eyeballs. :-(
C'est la vie.
The benevolent dictatorship only works if that person has been placed on a pedastal by the people, and the people fully support him/her.
Well, if they don't (and the code license permits) they can take the code and make a new country where they are the benevolent dictator. If enough of the population moves from the one dictatorship to the other then the new one will flourish. The neat thing is how infrequently such code splits have been required thus far. The Linux kernel itself has mom-and-dad-are-fighting disagreements between LT and AC, but no divorce yet (though there have been separations...).
In most ways, regexen will be less complex than ever, yet more powerful. Read Larry's rationale for changing them and let us know how he's wrong -- his reasons made a lot of sense to me.
The problem is that there is a shitload of utility and cgi perl that will be broken if the perl on the server is upgraded. In some cases, like at ISPs, the code belongs to lots and lots of people that are totally unconnected from the administration of the site, so updating it becomes a nightmare. It's probably going to mean running two versions of perl (fortunately, perl doesn't take up a lot of space in /usr :-P ) and having to invoke it with version numbers... the normal messy drill.
I'm sure that the changes will be great, but it's hard to get too excited since, I must confess, the current system didn't seem so horrible to me.
5 years after it's released, every regex library in existence will be compatible with the Perl 6 way of doing things, so you might as well start learning them now.
Obviously I will learn the new syntax. And I will update my scripts to work with perl6. Etc. Etc. The thing is, it looks like perl is going to be taking back a lot of the time it saved me in the past. Once I've paid that cost I may be able to forget about it, but at this point I'm looking at having to add something really tedious to my to do list. And it's not like I have a lot of thumb-twiddling time I can steal from...
And here I thought Solaris was backward for not having embraced perl earlier than Solaris 8. Maybe it will turn out that they were [unintentionally, I'm sure] smarter than I thought...
And that was supposed to be one of the comforting parts of the article. :-P
I guess I need to start making a list of all the perl scripts we have here in case we decide to upgrade... fortunately, that was something I always wanted to do. Oh wait... did I say "always"? I meant "never".
Oh well, in a few years we'll look back on this and laugh. And that makes it all O K. As long as we stop laughing... the ones who don't will be locked up and mdedicated. Then they will be O K, too.
Actually, sendmail is used to ... errrr ... SEND mail.
Well, you don't have to have it listening on port 25 to send mail from your server. It only needs to listen to the port to receive mail. Of course, that assumes you aren't using something locally that won't queue it up with /usr/lib/sendmail for some reason. In that case you -could- just start it on localhost:25 (IIRC, not all versions of sendmail let you bind to particular IPs, tho)... I'd rather replace the thing that won't use /usr/lib/sendmail, but I'm kind of a lovable curmudgeonly bastard that way... ;-)
I use exim at home rather than sendmail, but I administer about 100 Unix boxen at work that use sendmail for, among other things, remote security logging, availability monitoring [...]
I hear ya. YMMV, but try stopping the daemon on one the machines and send a test notice. Unless there is something really odd about your setup, the outgoing mail will still work. We run ours that way w/o a problem. Of course, you might say , "Hey, all my machines are behind a firewall, so relaying isn't an issue". But one less [fairly big] process is one less process. ;-) It's always good to turn off ports you don't absolutely need.
OSes shipping with an open relay version of sendmail running as default were real pissers a few years back. Fortunately, that's largely been cleaned up.
Well, ya see, Iris isn't open source so it's okay. They know that terrorists and pedophiles and aliens (oh my!) aren't poring over the source code for Irix looking for vulnerabilities! ;-)
Huh. Weird how the HR managers assumed that the MCSE's were not college graduates... ;-)
The thing is, the "we get to develop for one platform" bit also goes for people writing worms, virii, etc. Like driver writers, they want to go for the biggest bang for their buck. When a cross-platform one is written (like one Symantec announced) it's big news because it's so uncommon.
Anyway, I would assume that they are mainly worrried about security on systems that are unlikely to have a cheapo soundcard plugged into them on a whim. Although, given the nutball level of what we have heard about the report so far, I guess I should wait until the actual report before assuming anything... ;-)